“We’re so fucking cooked.” People say it when the news cycle brings another catastrophe—wildfires, economic collapse, rising fascism, another study confirming what we already knew about how bad things are going to get. It’s shorthand for resignation, a signal that the forces unraveling the world are too big to fight, that any attempt at collective resistance is too little, too late.
Some people sink into doomer fatalism, convinced there’s nothing to be done. Others pivot to enclave escapism, convinced there’s nothing to be saved. One camps out in despair, the other retreats to bunkers or gated communities. Both run on the same core assumption: that dependence is weakness, that collapse is inevitable, and that the best you can do is make peace with the end of the world.
This belief suits those in power, because a population that thinks everything is doomed doesn’t resist. A population that believes there’s no way out doesn’t try to build one.
If we want a future beyond collapse, we have to reject the idea that collapse is inevitable.
Survival has always been collective
Under neoliberalism, self-sufficiency has been held up for decades as the highest virtue. Needing public goods, relying on care networks, or depending on community is treated as something to be ashamed of. A person who loses a job or gets sick is expected to cope alone and blame only themselves.
But that’s not how people survive. It’s never been how people survive.
Pandemics make clear that healthcare isn’t an individual consumer choice; it’s a collective necessity. Wildfires and floods don’t respect property lines. Self-sufficiency is a fantasy—a story sold to keep us from recognizing that survival has always been collective.
We will rely on each other either way. Who structures that reliance, and to what end, is still open.
Right now, under capitalism, dependence is managed as a form of control. Housing is only available if you take on debt. Healthcare is only accessible if you keep the right job. Stability is always delayed—through student loans, corporate vesting schedules, precarious gig work.
Real security comes from organizing interdependence around equity and care instead of profit and coercion. Not from pretending we don’t need each other.
Surrender and escape make the same bet
Doomer fatalism is surrender masquerading as realism. It insists it’s just telling the hard truth: Climate collapse is locked in. Inequality is too vast to close. Every attempt at resistance is a rounding error in a system too big to be meaningfully challenged.
This assumes history moves in a straight line. It treats power as fixed, ignoring the fractures, leverage points, and moments when everything shifts. The analysis is weak.
Karl Polanyi (1944) described a double movement, in which society moves to protect itself as markets push to turn labor, land and money into commodities. We see that now: in labor organizing, in community-led responses to disasters, in alternative economic models taking hold at the edges of the system.
Doomerism talks people out of organizing before they start. It tells us that mutual aid after climate disasters is pointless. That union drives at Starbucks and Amazon won’t scale. That community land trusts are too small to matter.
No one has to crush resistance if enough people already believe there’s no point in trying.
If doomerism is surrender, enclave escapism is the fantasy that you can buy your way out. The billionaire bunker. The libertarian seastead. The quiet little “bug-out” plan for when things really start unraveling.
None of them work.
Galt’s Gulch Chile, a libertarian settlement, collapsed under fraud and infrastructure failures. Billionaire bunkers assume employees will stick around to maintain air-filtration systems instead of prioritizing their own survival. Even Sealand, the famous offshore micronation, exists only because the UK government tolerates it.
No one opts out of society. Power grids, supply chains, healthcare networks—all of it remains interconnected. The dream of escape is giving up wearing strategy.
The only choice is how we build what comes next.
The future isn’t written yet
Saying “we’re cooked” feels honest, but it shuts down imagination. It implies that nothing we do will matter, that the future is already written.
We are at an inflection point.
If profit continues to trump care, if isolation continues to win out over solidarity, collapse deepens. But if resources shift toward communal well-being, if care becomes infrastructure, there is another path.
Every large-scale shift started as a fringe experiment. Whether this ends in collapse or change depends on what people build where current institutions are failing them.
We are only cooked if cynicism and isolation keep us from organizing.
Collectively, we hold the capacity to shape a different ending. Whether that happens depends on how many of us join the mutual aid groups, union drives, and community land trusts that already exist.